Previously: Sports are the worst.
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The Deer Hunters
Sweeney: The episode’s adorable expository banter leads us into school supply shopping which is a thing I miss. I wrote out a whole very long paragraph about the glorious nostalgia this scene gave me, but I deleted it because I don’t want to blow my nostalgia quota before we even hit the intro. Moving on. There is adorable banter about how Rory needs serious school supplies for her serious school.
Where you lead, I will follow!
(I didn’t realize the intro was so quick. If I had known, I might have kept my Ode To Back To School Shopping. Next time.)
After the intro, Rory hurries off the bus only to run back on and grab her lunch. Inside, MAX MEDINA (M: WHY ARE WE SHOUTING.) (S: YOU KNOW NOTHING, MARI SNOW.) is handing out papers and our girl Rory has just received her first D and she is gutted. She’s actually holding it together surprisingly well. I cried about my first D, but I kind of saw it coming. Rory is still in shock.
Marines: I cried about my first D and my first detention. In related news, I cry a lot.
Sweeney: Same. Bloggers have lots of feelings.
Anyway, on the heels of that, he also warns the students that a really HARD test is coming up. Bell rings.
As everyone leaves the class, Paris and her minions saw Rory’s D and decide to torment her for shits and giggles. To add to this stellar day, Rory is harassed by Tristan in the halls.
Independence Inn. Michel and the sassy harp player (M: Is she not a big deal? I memorized her name and everything…) are bickering and Lorelai intervenes. She goes through the mail and finds a magazine that she excitedly brings into the kitchen to show to Sookie. It’s a review from a food critic. They are briefly interrupted by Rory’s arrival before Lorelai reads the rave review aloud. Lorelai is ecstatic and wants to celebrate, but Rory sullenly says she has to study while Sookie seems less enthused about the review.
The next day (probably, it could just as easily be some other day because time actually has no real meaning on this show) Rory goes to Lane’s. The two play a silly game of Marco Polo as Rory tries to find her way to Lane in the kitchen. As Rory gets out her things to begin studying, Mrs. Kim sells the table to a customer, so they immediately pack their things back up again.
As try to find a new spot to study, Rory laments how hard Chilton is, and how she misses Stars Hollow High. Lane is holding candy that Rory smuggled in for her, and Rory has to pretend it’s hers when Mrs. Kim spots it, chastising her for eating “chocolate covered death” and lady, I WILL FIGHT YOU. Chocolate is magical and delicious and helps you recover from dementors so BACK OFF.
Mari: This episode is being way harsh to desserts right now. Is that this week’s central conflict because I feel like it is.
Sweeney: You’re killing it at this TV thing.
Lane tells Rory that the tall new boy asked about Rory and said he seemed impressed by the fact that Rory went off to a smart kid school. The girls try to set up camp somewhere else in the house, but are shooed away to the library instead.
Independence Inn. Drella, the sassy harpist, is trying to get away with playing Black Sabbath on the harp and it’s kind of fun and cool, but Lorelai shuts it down. In the kitchen, Lorelai is disappointed to discover that the “fresh” coffee is very old. She tries to banter with Sookie, who is clearly distracted and upset. She’s obsessing over the fact that the critic described her risotto as merely “fine.” Sookie has superstitious attachment to this risotto, since she served it to her mother on her supposed death bed, but then SHE LIVED, which, you know, sounds like really fucking magical risotto to me. (M: Recipe pls.) Lorelai points out that the food critic probably did not know this story.
They are interrupted by Jackson who comes in, expecting to be yelled at for the specific produce items he doesn’t have with him, but is met with Sookie’s distracted indifference. Lorelai has to go, so she leaves Jackson to cheer Sookie up, but he is objectively very bad at it.
Chilton. Max Medina is talking to a room full of parents asking lots of very specific questions about the AP exam that he can’t answer, as he does not write the AP exam. Lorelai comes in late and makes a scene of introducing herself while all these parents are trying to make sure their many monies are buying many educations.
Anyway, that doesn’t really justify the truly juvenile cattiness of the other parents, but mercifully we are spared too much of that by the parents being dismissed to go talk to other teachers. They apparently have no one-on-one questions for Mr. Medina, as he is now free to flirt with Lorelai and unnecessarily touch her arm.
Mari: I was going to make a joke about stupid questions turning him on but he’s a teacher so I’m uncomfortable now.
Sweeney: There’s too much of that trauma elsewhere on the blog.
Lorelai gushes about Rory’s Harvard plans or, more specifically, Lorelai’s own wishes for her daughter to go to Harvard. Which, of course, is why Rory is at Chilton: because as much as Lorelai hated her parents’ world, she still wants Rory to have the opportunities she missed out on.
Anyway, Max lets slip that Rory got a D, which Lorelai did not actually know, and she realizes what an idiot she was being the other day. She leaves to go comfort her daughter, but not before we get some back and forth shots of Lorelai and Max’s I’ve Got A Crush eyes.
Luke’s. Luke appears with pie for Rory because she looks like she needs pie. How does one go about mastering this look and also a person to respond appropriately for this look? Asking for a friend. (M: Me?)
Lorelai arrives and tells her daughter she was a the parent-teacher conference that Rory forgot about. Lorelai asks why Rory let her nag like an idiot when she had something major going on and you guys, I know she does a lot of monumentally stupid stuff, but I just love her. Lorelai being a proper Good Mom like this is my real favorite. Acknowledging that Rory’s first D is a huge deal. Admitting that she made a mistake. I suppose if you’re new to this website you have no idea who I am, but TRUST that I slogged through so many! garbage! fictional! parents! for this site back in Prehistoric Traumaland. Good fictional parents are beautiful unicorns.
Rory explains that she couldn’t tell Lorelai because the whole thing was just too humiliating, and goes on about how this means she sucks and can’t do this. Lorelai reminds Rory that this isn’t the first time she had to patiently learn things and that giving up on herself isn’t something she does and then they banter about whether or not Rory is stubborn. More importantly: she can do this and Lorelai is going to help her. Rory asks if Lorelai really thinks she can do this and Lorelai jokingly bets her a dollar and I just want to say that Lorelai actually bet the thing she least wanted to do in this whole stupid world on her belief that Rory could and would do this, so. (M: Beautiful.)
Chilton. Paris creepily starts reciting Shakespeare all up in Rory’s bubble before telling her she’s going down. It’s some weird supervillainy shit.
Independence Inn. Sookie has been making every conceivable recipe for risotto only to conclude that the superstitious magic risotto is still the best risotto. She harasses a random waiter for intel on a guy he served weeks ago but obviously doesn’t remember because he serves a lot of people. He snarkily asks if he can spare himself this torture and just be fired and Lorelai agrees, but it does not save him.
Gilmore Girl House. Lorelai quizzes Rory to prep her for her test, but Rory does not appreciate Lorelai’s methods initially. We fade to black and back in again to show us that the eventually find their groove. (M: This moment of mother/daughterness was truly touching.) Lorelai suggests that they pack it in, but backs off that idea when Rory says she’s reviewing her notes again. She swears she’s not even tired, but after Rory is in the kitchen for an unspecified duration, Lorelai falls asleep on the couch and Rory tucks her in.
Later, Lorelai wakes up and sees Rory passed out at the kitchen table, so it’s her turn to cover Rory up. Except she doesn’t actually move her from the table – she falls asleep there herself.
Hours later, it is daylight and Rory wakes up in a panic: she’s late. She has missed her bus, which means Lorelai has to take her. Except, WHOOPS she can’t. She has an 8am meeting to get to, so she gives her car keys to Rory to drive herself. Except she’s not 16 yet, right? This is illegal, right?
Anyway, while Rory is on her way to school, she stops to call Lane to see if she left any of her notes there. Lane is relaxing in her Secret Closet Of Scandalous Things, and as she goes to look for Rory’s notes, she is hit by a deer. She doesn’t hit a deer; she gets hit by a deer.
Rory decides to get out and go look for the deer which, watching it now, is SO FUCKING STUPID, but also… once when I was 16 I was driving home from a concert and I swerved out of the way of a deer, but I still clipped its antlers. This took out my passenger side mirror (one of too many times I lost that stupid mirror in my idiotic teenage years) and while I was ostensibly looking for my mirror (which I did find on the side of the road!) I was mostly worried about the deer, which I did not find. I think about this now with all the, “WHY?” and “WHAT DO YOU HOPE THIS WILL ACCOMPLISH?” that I now reserve for Rory Gilmore, but Rory gets a side of, “Oh, yes, somewhere deep inside, I get it.”
Mari: I am endlessly entertained by your deer story. If you robbed us of a school supply gush just to give us this truly beautiful story of a deer and a lost side mirror, all is okay in the world.
Sweeney: I’m just trying to give the people what they want.
Unfortunately, Rory is a few minutes late for class and is no longer allowed to take the test. She tries to explain the situation to Mr. Medina, but he is just trying to calm her down and get her outside of the classroom, away from the other students who are just trying to take their dang test. Except for Paris, who decides to whisper more catty things, and Rory, emboldened by her feeling that she has nothing left to lose, finally tells her off. Rory says that Paris has everything – namely, the grades and status, which are the “everything” of the high school world – so what the hell is wrong with her that makes her feel the need to go out of her way to attack Rory?
And with that outburst, she is escorted from the room by Mr. Medina – though not before she gets in a shout at Tristan to learn her goddamned name.
Independence Inn. Lorelai is doing all sorts of managerial, boss lady things when she hears Sookie excitedly yelling from the kitchen. Sookie went digging and managed to find the two-faced, big haired food critic‘s receipt based on salads served and shifts the poor goateed waiter worked. Lorelai does not comment on the level of obsession that went into this hunt, but merely hugs Sookie in congratulations because based on the receipt, she concluded that it was actually all the food critic’s fault for ordering the wrong wine.
Jackson arrives and Sookie responds to his vegetable offerings in her usual fashion, back to her old self.
Chilton. Lorelai arrives to find Rory sitting on a bench in the hall and Rory explains what happened. Lorelai tells her not to worry because she is going to handle this.
Inside Headmaster Charleston’s Office, Lorelai tries to explain the situation while Mr. Medina stands behind Headmaster Charleston, who is having none of Lorelai’s explanations because Chilton is far too srsbsns for Lorelai and Rory’s poor people problems – being that Rory is almost certainly the only student at Chilton who has to rely on mass transit to get herself to and from school. Lorelai calls bullshit on the whole thing, but Headmaster Charleston shows her the door and tells her to gtfo, noting that Rory (in spite of Lorelai’s objections that this is not possible) had a similar outburst in class. He adds that any further outbursts are “not on the list of options” for them.
Mari: It’s a real credit to this show that I get real invested in the injustice-lite of their problems. I know that Lorelai’s outburst is not the thing to do but I’m cheering her on in my heart.
Sweeney: Indeed. I am almost more distressed by the ban on outbursts than by the exam situation itself.
In the hall, the girls sit in silence for a bit before Lorelai turns to Rory and says, somewhat incredulously, “You got hit by a deer?”
Cut to outside where Lorelai inspects the antler marks and confirms that Rory was, indeed, hit by a deer. They head home.
Elsewhere, Sookie is engaging in some high level stalker creep behavior. She has shown up at the door of her food critic, though she keeps her back to the door, I guess so that she won’t see his face? I don’t food criticism etiquette, though I am quite confident this whole thing is a big ass breech of it. She’s got a new plate of risotto and a new glass of wine, and insists that the man try it. Luckily for Sookie, he merely takes the dish and glass and doesn’t seem like he’s going to call the cops.
On the drive home, Lorelai is trying to get Rory to talk about what happened, but she doesn’t want to. Suddenly Rory tells Lorelai to stop because he wants to go into the woods to see if the deer is all right. As they start walking, Lorelai mentions what Headmaster Charleston told her about Rory freaking out in class. Lorelai says that this isn’t who Rory is and it’s a sign that Rory is pushing herself too hard and needs to cool it a little. She suggests leaving Chilton as a way to do that, which Rory takes to mean that Lorelai doesn’t believe in her.
Lorelai doesn’t push that because what she’s actually concerned about here is that she is responsible for pushing her daughter to this point. She says that she doesn’t remember a time when Harvard wasn’t the goal, and now she’s worried that Harvard is actually just a Lorelai wish and not what Rory truly wants after all. What Lorelai really wants for her daughter is to be happy.
Rory assures her mother that she isn’t doing this for her and that she knows that Lorelai wouldn’t care if she decided she didn’t want that after all. But she does. She was just behind and hadn’t caught up yet. She’s newly determined now, though, and assures her mother that she can and will recover that ground. She wants Chilton and Harvard.
She does, however, reserve the right to change her mind. Rory thanks her mother for yelling at the headmaster for her and they continue their search for the deer.
Back at home, Lorelai tells Rory to get out of her uniform and drop her books so that they can go to Luke’s. As that’s happening, Lorelai checks the messages and there is already one from Mr. Medina. He convinced Headmaster Charleston to let Rory do some “time-consuming, probably-painful” extra credit work in order to get herself back up to where Mr. Medina believes she should be.
He adds at the end of the message that it was a pleasure encountering Lorelai and he hopes it will happen again. It’s a little weird to flirt with your student’s mom at the end of a message explicitly directed to said student, but whatever. Lorelai smiles happily and we fade to black.
This episode is full of A+ parenting from Lorelai and it warms my soul. I like the fact that she took a moment to check in with Rory and make sure that Rory was chasing dreams that were really her own. Being the parent who forces their child down a path of their choosing is, obviously, the very Becoming My Parents thing that Lorelai so fears.
Next time on Gilmore Girls: A cat dies in S01 E05 – Cinnamon’s Wake.
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
